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新加坡管理大学学者 Sarah Shi Hui Wong 于2026年10月5日在开放获取期刊《Instructional Science》发表研究：276名大学生先学习实验设计原则，再分别用“正确练习”“故意做错再改”“挑同伴故意错误并改正”三种方式练习。结果显示，故意做错再改的学生在近迁移与更复杂的远迁移设计任务上表现更好；两类接触错误的练习也更有助于发现错误设计、预判具体失误。学生对这种方法的益处却缺乏元认知觉察。本文据该研究改写。

正文

Many people think that the best way to learn is to avoid mistakes. On October 5, 2026, Instructional Science published open access research by Sarah Shi Hui Wong that points the other way. After a short lesson on how to design fair experiments, university students who intentionally made bad designs — then fixed them — later designed better experiments than students who only practiced good designs.
Wong recruited 276 students at a large public university in Singapore. All of them watched the same 25-minute lesson on five design principles, including a control group, measuring important background factors, changing only the key variable, random assignment, and a pretest-posttest plan. These ideas matter because science curricula in several countries ask students to run fair tests. Then each student had 15 minutes of open-book practice on a coffee-and-memory problem. One group designed a valid experiment and explained it. A second group designed an invalid experiment on purpose, explained each error, and corrected it. A third group received a peer’s deliberate errors, spotted them, explained them, and corrected them.
On a near transfer test with a similar structure but new surface details, both methods that used errors beat errorless practice. The deliberate-erring group scored highest. On a harder far transfer test that required a more complex design drawn from a teacher dialogue, only deliberate erring clearly outperformed the other two methods. Spotting others’ errors helped near transfer, but it did not give the same far transfer advantage.
Both groups that worked with errors also did better than errorless practice when they had to critique a flawed study and when they had to anticipate problem specific design mistakes. Those results suggest that working with invalid designs builds useful negative knowledge — a clearer sense of what not to do. Still, knowing what not to do was not enough for the most complex new designs. Generating and fixing one’s own errors seemed to deepen learning of the correct principles as well.
Students were largely unaware of these benefits. After practice, and even after the tests, the three groups did not differ much in how effective they thought their method had been. The study does not claim that every classroom should start with intentional mistakes. It does suggest that, after clear instruction, carefully designed deliberate erring can be an effective approach for teaching experimental design — and that learners may undervalue it even when it helps them transfer what they know.

新闻来源

• Instructional Science · Deliberate erring improves scientific reasoning: Learning experimentation skills by intentionally designing invalid experiments (5 Oct 2026)
• Sarah Shi Hui Wong · author PDF

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